If you figure out a set of 1000 short words that are not too close to each other and easy to pronounce, four of them gives you a trillion possible combinations. If you window it so that the first word is always the same on a given day and keep a record of that list, you can differentiate a billion combinations in a day and have a good check that the information was gathered recently (or else is a thousand or more days old.) http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/lists/l/ will get you common words, as a start.
This is especially brilliant in this situation because it would make the OP's website invaluable for over the phone debugging - the (unfortunate) situation in which it is most likely to be used. Numeral lists are anathema to phonecalls.
That's a nice compilation. I used lists from here: http://www.bckelk.ukfsn.org/menu.html to programmatically compile a list for a similar purpose, and a markov-chain based sentence generator that I didn't use because it could generate sensitive stuff occasionally...
Wow, talk about synchronicity... I put up our site doing the exact same thing last night! Design-wise you're definitely ahead, however. :-)
Our version is at http://www.browser-details.com. When you sign up you get your own subdomain - or you define a CNAME under your own domain [premium]. You can upload your logo, define a list of recipients, and your clients can send the browser details directly to one of those recipients/departments.
We still need to change the color scheme (I wanted to launch at the end of the week, so it's straight Bootstrap for now) and finish the translation to German. Also: Premium version!
Feel free to be a beta tester! Also: all the best to the OP, great idea! ;-)
Your site correctly identified my browser as Chrome for iPhone. OP's site detected it as Safari on OS/2. Kudos. Perhaps you could share some insights on why this might be.
Your design is definitely superior from a usability standpoint. Mad props to the OP for a nice site (though the reports of inaccurate reporting is alarming) but tomorrow I will be going your link to my phone girl. An example is the OP's large logo icon in the center of the page (serves little to no purpose) and the requirement to scroll the page to find extra info. Good on you man!
Edit: suggestion - allow the subdomian feature to work with www in front. A lot of the type of people who will be going to these pages will automatically type www dot in front and it bounces to the homepage. Still of course works, but removes the nifty send button.
Your design is definitely way better in my opinion; much easier to focus in on any specific information immediately (and with no scrolling required).
The only significant usability change I'd make to both sites would be have the one who wants to know the details send a link to a setter URL of a known key (e.g. '/set/foo') which would both display the information to the user and send the information to the server so that '/foo' now persistently displays the same information. That way, any potential user (say, an IT helpdesk person) doesn't require any expectations of the person whose details they want other than the ability to click a link.
Or better, let me sign up for an account and register a named webhook with you, as in, https://aboutmybrowser.com/mysite, that would automatically forward information from anybody hitting it to the webhook url I'd configured at mysite.com.
Yep! That's the next step. We wanted to get the MVP out and get feedback from the community. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (again, no bullshit and just product announcements) - https://twitter.com/aboutmybrowser
There's also supportdetails.com which has a feature to let you customise [1] the recipient email etc so people can easily forward the details through to you.
Yep. That one looks good and showed up in our research as well. In aboutmybrowser, we generate a custom url for you so you can copy the url and share your info easily. No need to copy all the text or enter your email to share the info. Just better to protect your privacy and anonymity.
More of the similar products out there focus on users who want to find out their info (basically savvy users). This is for support agents who want to find out their users' browser info without asking them to go through so much trouble
We used that as a jumping off point when we created my company's support portal. We added a contact form and text box for the user to describe the issue, as well as the option to attach a screen shot. Once submitted it creates a ticket in our support system.
It has allowed us to troubleshoot issues quicker without having to do the back and forth of trying to get our customer to figure out what OS or browser they are running.
That's an interesting Firefox logo you're displaying. Rather than featuring the generic "Planet Mozilla" globe, it appears to be using a map of Earth centered on Japan. The fox looks a bit sleeker as well.
As geeks, we tend to forget sometimes how trivial questions such as "What browser are you using" leave some users completely stumped. Heck, there may be so many people who do not even know the meaning of a browser. This seems a simple yet great way to get the required info. Kudos!
I have cookies and javascript turned off in Chrome on Android. This apparently is too much to handle as I keep getting the standard rails request failure page.
I switched to the default android browser where I run JavaScript and accept cookies and was told I was running Chrome on Linux.
I then went back to Chrome and hit "request desktop site" which just changes the user agent string and was told I had Chrome on Linux. But also was told that I needed to turn on JavaScript to see the rest of the details. Why? It's just text.
I see now that some of the extra info is only discernable via JavaScript. But surely the info about whether JavaScript and cookies are enabled could be shown either way?
Love it, I forwarded it to our QA and support team. One problem seems to be since the url bar is automatically updated (redirect?) with the current results people ended up bookmarking it instead of the just "aboutmybrowser.com" so they saw FF come up as a result in IE and such when opening in other browser.
Seems nice. A couple of things:
1) It would be cool if it gets shorter urls so it would be usable on phone.
2) It detects Safari on Linux for me. Im using Konqueror. https://aboutmybrowser.com/848858317
For Firefox on OS X, at least, it seems to be reporting the resolution of the display which the window is mostly on.
I think this corresponds to the display which holds the backing store for the window, but I'm not sure -- if you drag a window between a HiDPI display and a normal display, for example, it's rendered as a HiDPI window if it's mostly on the HiDPI display, and vice versa.
I agree that I don't know if it's possible to do the "right" thing, or even exactly what the "right" thing would be.
I'm not really sure if it's a glitch in the tool or that the resolution is (deliberately?) misreported by my browser, but on my iPad 3 it reports 1024x768.
A nice extension to this would be to add some kind of database of popular mobile devices, so you can detect the device type from the reported attributes. I think you coud extract some interesting device usage statistics out of it.
Suggestion: Check the version against the latest release and kindly notify visitors if a newer release is available. Provide the link to make it easy to upgrade.
I've often had family and friends ask me why some site or service doesn't work but they don't know if their browsers are up to date. I would love to start by directing them to a site like this and telling them to upgrade if they aren't using the latest version of their browser.
I don't know how easy it is (or if it's even possible) but it would be really useful to detect what add-ons are enabled. Things like Adblock, Flashblock, cause a lot of trouble and some users don't even know that they have them installed.
I also wonder whether it's possible to detect whether Flash is actually enabled. I disable the Flash plugin on Chrome by default, but tools like this generally don't pick up on that.
It's unfortunate that when using IE, both this and supportdetails.com only give versions as specific as "Windows XP" and "IE 8", whereas I get more detailed version info using Chrome on OS X.
I'm trying to track down an IE issue and would love for our support team to get customers to use something like this. But we need more info to make it easier to reproduce the problem.
Can you please give us the permalink you get? Here or at prateek@supportbee.com so we can debug this? We want to make this super useful. This is just a MVP.
If you access a direct link (to someone's browser info) the page should make it clear that it's not your browser you are visiting. Now it says "share your browser info" even if you opened some other url.
works nicely for me in firefox/opera, but doesn't do too well in anything else... although I'd doubt you'd need to worry about them too much, still, it's always nice to see apps like this fail gracefully, if you had a 'this particular browser isn't supported' type message rather than 'something went wrong'
You don't make a great use of screen space. On my laptop, the very bottom thing on the page I can see is a giant 'chrome' logo. I initially assumed all you were doing is displaying the icon of my web-browser. 2/3 of the screen height is basically empty, apart from one tiny text box.
You should be grabbing this on your contact us page for your technical support enquiries and then, in your message to whomever gets the requests, add a bit add the bottom with 'for technical support use' followed by the browser information.
Latest (regular desktop) Chrome on Windows 8 gets reported as Windows NT.
I mean.. Sure there's probably quite a bit of remnants from the Windows NT codebase here and there, but it's probably not very useful for reporting to support etc.
Any modern version of Windows will show up here as "Windows NT". I think you should be able to determine the correct version through the user agent string. "Windows NT 6.2" is Win8, 6.1 is Win7, 6.0 is Vista.
Nice, but it does not work very well for me (Opera on Mac). It reports the browser and OS correctly, but then it claims I do not have JavaScript enabled (which I do). Also when I click Contact support at the bottom, the page gets dimmed out as if for a dialog, but I see no actual dialog anywhere. So somewhere in your JS code there is a bug that makes it fail in Opera.
https://aboutmybrowser.com/2079851324
I had to send five "what browser are you using" e-mails just last Friday. And people never send the OS when we ask. Thank you, thank you for making this.
One thing that has become standard practice for me is to have any "contact us" forms or error reporting pages automatically include all of this information when sending messages. I also generally record persist the browser information on important "events" such as registration and login, so I can refer to it if I need it later.
You don't need it most of the time, but it saves so much time to not have to bother asking for it.
Might not work properly for users in China. It's telling me I don't have JavaScript enabled, when I do (Firefox on OSX, no weird extensions), and based on the tab bar icon is still loading after >2 minutes. Perhaps you're loading some blocked-in-China script that's preventing your page load event?
Update: The page did eventually load and worked properly. I looked at your page source and found Facebook and Google Plus, which are both blocked here - that would probably be what was stopping it working before. Perhaps you should load these asynchronously, instead of waiting for them to load / time out before updating the information?
Thanks for reporting this. Only when we started working on this we realized how complex user agent string parsing is. We will be improving it with all the feedback so you can expect things to be better in a day or so.
I gave this out in a suggestion couple weeks ago in #javascript on freenode. Nice job, since this is what I was looking for. Previously was using http://www.mybrowserinfo.com/detail.asp?bhcp=1
Is it possible to identify certain add-ons in firefox even if they aren't in the user agent string, or is that the only information you get from the client?
Would be cool if it could tell that I use pentadactyl, stylish, ad-block plus etc. etc.
We used something similar for our support requests, a helpful piece to add may ad block. You can check if ad block is on by trying to load some js on a path with usual ad block triggers.
I would rather ask people to send their inquires through my "contact us" form, wherein I could collect all the data I need. Much less confusing to the user, me thinks...
It does the same thing for me - i'm browsing on my primary monitor, but it reports the resolution of my leftmost monitor. I'm guessing there isn't much that can be done other than file a bug report with whoever makes your browser.
nice idea. found it a bit annoying that I had to scroll to get some details that could easily sit above the fold.....i recognise the need for some sort of virality and share-ability, and also that the idea is users will send tech support the link, but perhaps it could be tempered a little and you could push some important details above the fold - for example browser and browser version and javascript on or off.
I take it you've never done support or tried to fix a users issue?
Trying to find out what browser and version a user has can often be like pulling teeth if they're not an experienced internet users; being able to link them to a page and get all the info you need without a miscommunication is a godsend.
I noticed that in Chrome too, but with 'click to play' turned on for plugins in the preferences... Not sure if it's a good or bad thing actually, since I'd rather sites assume I'm displaying flash so that I can continue blocking the flash content they want to show me, rather than them displaying it via other means.
Actually I visited it with Javascript disable. Saw the note about details needing JS, smiled in anticipation of Javascript being used to sniff details, got "javascript: false". I think they save the results but use JS to display only (bleh...).
It's this kind of negativity I wish I never read on Show HN threads. Woeful? Seriously? Deplorably bad or wretched[1]? It's an MVP of an interesting concept and this is how you respond?
Sorry to disappoint you. This is just a MVP and we will be adding a lot more stuff (including Java detection) in the coming weeks. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (since we don't want to capture your email address)
dsr_|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/dog_walrus_banana_door
If you figure out a set of 1000 short words that are not too close to each other and easy to pronounce, four of them gives you a trillion possible combinations. If you window it so that the first word is always the same on a given day and keep a record of that list, you can differentiate a billion combinations in a day and have a good check that the information was gathered recently (or else is a thousand or more days old.) http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/lists/l/ will get you common words, as a start.
zethraeus|13 years ago
Great suggestion.
muyuu|13 years ago
sylvinus|13 years ago
hoov|13 years ago
jonasvp|13 years ago
Our version is at http://www.browser-details.com. When you sign up you get your own subdomain - or you define a CNAME under your own domain [premium]. You can upload your logo, define a list of recipients, and your clients can send the browser details directly to one of those recipients/departments.
We still need to change the color scheme (I wanted to launch at the end of the week, so it's straight Bootstrap for now) and finish the translation to German. Also: Premium version!
Feel free to be a beta tester! Also: all the best to the OP, great idea! ;-)
pakeha|13 years ago
ftwinnovations|13 years ago
Edit: suggestion - allow the subdomian feature to work with www in front. A lot of the type of people who will be going to these pages will automatically type www dot in front and it bounces to the homepage. Still of course works, but removes the nifty send button.
buu700|13 years ago
The only significant usability change I'd make to both sites would be have the one who wants to know the details send a link to a setter URL of a known key (e.g. '/set/foo') which would both display the information to the user and send the information to the server so that '/foo' now persistently displays the same information. That way, any potential user (say, an IT helpdesk person) doesn't require any expectations of the person whose details they want other than the ability to click a link.
davewasthere|13 years ago
Well done!
CCs|13 years ago
AboutMyBrowser.com (correct):
Browser-Details.com: https://aboutmybrowser.com/4031483493paulovsk|13 years ago
rplnt|13 years ago
jasonkester|13 years ago
"Thanks for reporting the issue. Would you mind following this link so that we can get some information about your web browser? https://aboutmybrowser.com/?to=mysite.com/browserhook
Or better, let me sign up for an account and register a named webhook with you, as in, https://aboutmybrowser.com/mysite, that would automatically forward information from anybody hitting it to the webhook url I'd configured at mysite.com.
That would rock.
prateekdayal|13 years ago
telecuda|13 years ago
The same idea works well for us with http://mysite.com/team pointing to a TeamViewer session.
aidos|13 years ago
[1] http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=example&sender=em...
ashastry|13 years ago
More of the similar products out there focus on users who want to find out their info (basically savvy users). This is for support agents who want to find out their users' browser info without asking them to go through so much trouble
mikerastiello|13 years ago
It has allowed us to troubleshoot issues quicker without having to do the back and forth of trying to get our customer to figure out what OS or browser they are running.
kibwen|13 years ago
For comparison, here's the official Firefox branding page: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/brand/identity/
prateekdayal|13 years ago
lordlarm|13 years ago
Also, why are you using (ugly) unofficial icons for some of the browsers (Opera for example)? :)
jablan|13 years ago
josteink|13 years ago
ashastry|13 years ago
sassyboy|13 years ago
stanleydrew|13 years ago
I have cookies and javascript turned off in Chrome on Android. This apparently is too much to handle as I keep getting the standard rails request failure page.
I switched to the default android browser where I run JavaScript and accept cookies and was told I was running Chrome on Linux.
I then went back to Chrome and hit "request desktop site" which just changes the user agent string and was told I had Chrome on Linux. But also was told that I needed to turn on JavaScript to see the rest of the details. Why? It's just text.
stanleydrew|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/3112024109 https://aboutmybrowser.com/2548601500 https://aboutmybrowser.com/3662672473
I see now that some of the extra info is only discernable via JavaScript. But surely the info about whether JavaScript and cookies are enabled could be shown either way?
cnlwsu|13 years ago
twog|13 years ago
calinet6|13 years ago
pdw|13 years ago
Iceweasel 15 (rebadged Firefox) on Linux.
prateekdayal|13 years ago
ashastry|13 years ago
[deleted]
emilsedgh|13 years ago
prateekdayal|13 years ago
We'll work on the urls. As such the layout scales down on phones (thanks to Bootstrap 2.0)
ashastry|13 years ago
[deleted]
anonymoushn|13 years ago
ken|13 years ago
I think this corresponds to the display which holds the backing store for the window, but I'm not sure -- if you drag a window between a HiDPI display and a normal display, for example, it's rendered as a HiDPI window if it's mostly on the HiDPI display, and vice versa.
I agree that I don't know if it's possible to do the "right" thing, or even exactly what the "right" thing would be.
w0utert|13 years ago
A nice extension to this would be to add some kind of database of popular mobile devices, so you can detect the device type from the reported attributes. I think you coud extract some interesting device usage statistics out of it.
JoeAltmaier|13 years ago
tsieling|13 years ago
johns|13 years ago
irfan|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/2691400901
robbiea|13 years ago
ddffnn|13 years ago
I've often had family and friends ask me why some site or service doesn't work but they don't know if their browsers are up to date. I would love to start by directing them to a site like this and telling them to upgrade if they aren't using the latest version of their browser.
sanat|13 years ago
dkroy|13 years ago
wldlyinaccurate|13 years ago
I also wonder whether it's possible to detect whether Flash is actually enabled. I disable the Flash plugin on Chrome by default, but tools like this generally don't pick up on that.
MartinCron|13 years ago
You should be able to try to actually do something with a tiny embedded flash application and have that flip a "yes, flash is really on" bit.
ottbot|13 years ago
I'm trying to track down an IE issue and would love for our support team to get customers to use something like this. But we need more info to make it easier to reproduce the problem.
prateekdayal|13 years ago
cabirum|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/647576433
prateekdayal|13 years ago
The app is primarily for people doing customer support to understand if their users are using supported browsers and right plugins (like flash etc).
Info link - https://aboutmybrowser.com/?nr (no-redirect since we want it to be zero click for your users)
rplnt|13 years ago
deno|13 years ago
demo: https://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goo...
docs: https://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/docs/closure_goog...
q_revert|13 years ago
http://imgur.com/a/chkc2
broken useragents..
konqueror: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.6; Linux) KHTML/4.6.5 (like Gecko) Fedora/4.6.5-8.fc14
seamonkey: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110429 Fedora/2.0.14-1.fc14 SeaMonkey/2.0.14
dillo: dillo/0.8.6 < -- wouldn't worry about that one too much :)
epiphany: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-ie) AppleWebKit/534.16+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/534.16+ Epiphany/2.30.6
midori: Midori/0.2 (X11; Linux; U; en-ie) WebKit/534.7+
ashastry|13 years ago
CJefferson|13 years ago
IndigoIRIS|13 years ago
josteink|13 years ago
I mean.. Sure there's probably quite a bit of remnants from the Windows NT codebase here and there, but it's probably not very useful for reporting to support etc.
rlu|13 years ago
helentoomik|13 years ago
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
msredmond|13 years ago
MartinCron|13 years ago
You don't need it most of the time, but it saves so much time to not have to bother asking for it.
Steko|13 years ago
There are a number of firefox add ons that do the same, this one has site specific settings which is exactly what I needed and it works great:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/uacontrol/
matan_a|13 years ago
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/help_doc.php
Mind their (new) license tho if you plan to use them specifically.
Seems like a great fit so the user does not have to perform their own cross-referencing.
kevin_p|13 years ago
kevin_p|13 years ago
nemetroid|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/47523742 is an example where I used User Agent Switcher in Firefox with the UA string
prateekdayal|13 years ago
fourstar|13 years ago
gulbrandr|13 years ago
_feda_|13 years ago
Would be cool if it could tell that I use pentadactyl, stylish, ad-block plus etc. etc.
nodata|13 years ago
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
tzaman|13 years ago
pavanky|13 years ago
http://imgur.com/eYdlo,XjsOH
EDIT: I am on ArchLinux if that helps.
keithpeter|13 years ago
wreckimnaked|13 years ago
heroic|13 years ago
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14534468/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-10...
prateekdayal|13 years ago
We are working on adding more browser icons. Thank you for your patience
john-n|13 years ago
jelder|13 years ago
https://aboutmybrowser.com/4004112543
(Actually, Chrome os iOS, but close enough.)
klodolph|13 years ago
DenisM|13 years ago
ivankirigin|13 years ago
I'm browsing on a second monitor
aleyan|13 years ago
My multi monitor setup reports even wilder results: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1708443426
notatoad|13 years ago
vog|13 years ago
"We're sorry, but something went wrong."
Is it a bug in the browser recognition, or is the site simply down due to its exposure to HN?
HyprMusic|13 years ago
ashastry|13 years ago
countessa|13 years ago
prateekdayal|13 years ago
caio1982|13 years ago
Really, guys? It's mothereffing lynx!
asdfaoeu|13 years ago
emeraldd|13 years ago
SeanDav|13 years ago
This is a genuine question, I have no idea why this seems important/interesting enough to be No 1 on HN.
What am I missing?
citricsquid|13 years ago
Trying to find out what browser and version a user has can often be like pulling teeth if they're not an experienced internet users; being able to link them to a page and get all the info you need without a miscommunication is a godsend.
zackkitzmiller|13 years ago
artjumble|13 years ago
emillon|13 years ago
sordina|13 years ago
tshadwell|13 years ago
ritcho|13 years ago
victordg|13 years ago
xsaero00|13 years ago
laserbrain|13 years ago
_pferreir_|13 years ago
tech-no-logical|13 years ago
aw3c2|13 years ago
antihero|13 years ago
ashastry|13 years ago
slykat|13 years ago
Shorel|13 years ago
mmahemoff|13 years ago
Would be brilliant if it ran the browser through a battery of capability tests (like HTML5test.com).
prawn|13 years ago
prateekdayal|13 years ago
rjsw|13 years ago
bkardell|13 years ago
justanotheratom|13 years ago
gosu|13 years ago
"We're sorry, but something went wrong."
Rulero|13 years ago
unknown|13 years ago
[deleted]
gog|13 years ago
ashitvora|13 years ago
newman314|13 years ago
gsmcnamara|13 years ago
christopherscot|13 years ago
anandpdoshi|13 years ago
roshanonline|13 years ago
derleth|13 years ago
Lynx on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1909674851
w3m on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1942341369
links on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3183933151
elinks on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3918182904
Also, it works just fine on Firefox with NoScript blocking JavaScript from your site.
lemieux|13 years ago
ashastry|13 years ago
markmm|13 years ago
brittohalloran|13 years ago
override|13 years ago
[deleted]
ck2|13 years ago
https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes
heyitsnick|13 years ago
1. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/woefully
prateekdayal|13 years ago
andyjohnson0|13 years ago